WHAT HAVE BRUNEL AND McADAM IN COMMON?

                                WHAT HAVE BRUNEL AND McADAM IN COMMON?

I tell you what they have in common - they'd both be turning in their graves if they knew just how long the roadworks on the M25 were taking between Junctions 5 and 6.   They appear to be replacing the central barriers that separate north and south, or in that part of the world, east and west.    I have to travel that section quite frequently and the number of accidents that one finds oneself behind, the queues of which are hideously long and up to an hour to get through.   And what do you witness from your driver's window as you sit patiently, because that is what an Englishman does?  I tell you what you see.   Bugger all going on.  There's white cars with flashing lights, there are various high viz jackets with hard hats talking, but precious little work being done.   Are they on piece work?   Or is the contract spread out over so long a period so as to incur no penalty charges.   I cannot believe that the Victorians wouldn't have had this one sussed and repaired within an extremely short time span.   When you think that the Great Western Railway changed hundreds of miles of broad gauge track to standard gauge over one weekend it makes you extremely depressed at the lack of progress we've made since those great innovators of engineering were around.

WHY CAN'T MY COMPUTER BE NORMAL?

                                          WHY CAN'T MY COMPUTER BE NORMAL?

We're going to have to do something about this computer.   It is now taking up to 20 minutes just for the cursor to react to a command from yours truly - well, not actually yours truly as my wife is typing this.  As you know, I am completely computer illiterate, so I dictate from the sidelines whilst my wife types, but as she says, you've been dictating for the last 40 years, so why stop now!   Even as she is typing this a box keeps appearing in the corner and the cursor springs to life in top left-hand side of the screen and you have to close the box before you can return to what you are doing - why?

The other day I asked it to print a letter, nothing complicated, just a letter.   This action should have taken (sorry, just had to stop to delete a previous e-mail  we have just sent which suddenly appeared in this sentence!) place immediately at 4.15 pm.   Despite making grunting noises and lulling me into a false sense of security that something was actually going to happen, nothing was forthcoming in the printer tray.  At 2 am I was awoken to the sound of the printer bursting into life and going through the machinations of my one letter, plus 20 forms I had asked it to print the day before!

I wasn't aware that computers were dyslexic either.   On Thursday of last week I had to travel to Aldington in Kent, so I typed in - or rather my wife typed in - Aldington Village Hall, Kent.   It came up with Adlington Village Hall.   Yes, our spelling was right, but its interpretation wasn't.   The problem is that nowadays I don't know what to replace it with as you can't trust anyone at PCWorld or at Curry's not to sell you a machine they get the greatest commission on.   If I sound cynical it's just that I live in England and expect poor service.